Can this iLife-like note-taker justify its hefty price tag?

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Our Verdict

For

Against

No built-in templates

No control over images

Thoughts bills itself as a flexible note and information manager, aimed at anyone wanting a hassle-free means of storing snippets and ideas.

On first launch, Thoughts immediately struck us as curious. It's a bit reminiscent of an iPad app – the interface resembles a real-world journal with 'bound' pages, notes are automatically saved, and content is shared via export to RTF, PDF, DOC or ODT, rather like Pages for iPad.

Despite a tiresome (and impossible to disable) page-turn animation, these aspects of Thoughts actually work pretty well, and it's easy to create new pages and search content by keyword or date.

Where things fall down is in the simplistic nature of page layouts; this is because in terms of functionality, Thoughts offers little over TextMate. Sure, there's a lovely toolbar for styling your text, but you only get the same options that are available in TextMate (which means no image formatting or resizing), along with buttons for adding links to web pages, email addresses and local files.

We also found it disappointing that no starter templates are offered to get you going with any document types.

Overall, Thoughts isn't a bad app, and it's a suitable – if somewhat pricey – means of keeping a digital diary or storing the odd snippet.

However, for more advanced writing tasks, the free Bean equals it; for task and information management, grab TaskPaper if you favour simplicity, or Things, which is as elegant as Thoughts but far more versatile.